Ella wakes up in a small, half-dried pool of blood that came from her head wound. The large room swirls around her as she sits up. She tries to steady her vision but finds that her eyes seem like they are fogged over. Everything appears to have a white hue to it.
Due to the head wound she suffered, a lot of nerve endings were severely damaged. She will never see well again. She is lucky to have not completely lost her vision.
She sees a plate of delicious-looking food sitting a few feet from her. Ella lunges towards it to begin scarfing it down into her starving stomach but she is pulled back to her original spot. She turns to see the chain attached to her collar and the floorboards that yanked on her neck, causing her to be propelled backwards.
She is chained up like a disobedient dog.
Ella tries to pull at the part of the chain that is connected to the floor. No matter how hard she pulls, she will not be able to undo the bolts it is held down with. Despite this, she continues pulling.
Shawna sits in a chair in the corner of the large room, watching Ella struggle with the chain to get to the food he left as bait for her.
"Do you feel like I have wronged you Ella? Like I should let you eat? I led you on by putting the plate there didn't I?" Shawna asks her rhetorically. "You see, I did that on purpose. I wanted you to feel exactly how it felt when you broke your promise and told your mom about me. I can't believe you lied to me like that after I did you a favor. You betrayed me."
Ella releases the chain around her neck. "Please take this off. I won't do anything like that ever again. Please. I just want to eat." She begs Shawna. She stands out of her chair. Ella tries to follow her around the room with her eyes but finds that moving them hurts.
Her heart races and her breathing speeds up rapidly as she walks towards her. Ella braces herself for impact. Deep down, she knows that nothing Shawna can do to her could possibly be worse than killing Aubrey and taking her away from her family. No amount of beatings could surpass how hurt she is because she can't see any of them right now.
"You are going to have to earn my trust back. That takes time. Lucky for you, you've got a lot of time to think about what you've done now." Shawna leaves the room. Ella continues begging to just be able to eat. She isn't even asking Shawna to unchain her anymore. She just wants to be close enough to the plate to be able to eat the food off of it.
Ella cries as the door slams shut. She wants to eat. She wants to go home. She misses her bed. Ella thinks about how her mom used to tuck her into bed at night. She wishes her mom could be here now to hold her close and tell her everything is going to be okay. She thinks of how her dad must be hurting without his little girl around.
Ella thinks about Aubrey's dead body laying before her in her bedroom on that fateful night. She doesn't know how long it's been since then but it feels like a lifetime ago. Though, the pain hasn't gotten any easier as time has gone by.
Ella knows she is never going to see her family ever again. She knows Shawna will never let her go. Now that she has come to terms that she will never leave this place, she wishes to die quickly. She doesn't want to deal with this slow, agonizing death that she will be facing.
She begins to yell as loud as she possibly can, asking Shawna to kill her, to end her misery. She has had enough of this torture. She is ready to die. She tells her to just kill her already. She knows one day, Shawna will snap and kill her by accident. She wants that day to be today. Her thinking: it's just going to happen, why not get it done and over with? Killing her now would save them both the trouble of her living any longer.
Shawna stands outside the door and cries silently as she listens to Ella's agonizing pleas for her own death. It breaks her heart to hear Ella in pain like this.
Ella sobs at his lack of response and continues trying to reach the plate of food taunting her from across the room. She thinks this is an even worse punishment than the shock collar. At least with the collar, the pain eventually goes away. With this, her stomach slowly eats away at itself for hours and hours.
Ella throws herself at the food one last time, choking herself as the collar tightens around her. She continues pushing herself, turning purple as she fails to open her airway back up.
AN: thoughts?
